


better than even

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Breech of trust, Dom Cobb is so crummy, Eames just wants to make sure they're all on the same page, Gen, M/M, extraction, pre slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 18:18:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4315404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames extracted from Arthur once. He just wanted to know if he knew about Cobb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	better than even

When it occurs to him, Cobb is in his corner, drawing in front of him, completely ignoring the protests Arthur has put up. Protests, which, to be fair, are completely perfunctory.

Except, Eames is not in the mood to be fair to Cobb, because he is a twat, but mostly because no matter how idiotic he’s become in his desperation to get his name cleared so he can settle back in with his children, Arthur is going to let him take every stupid risk and make a backup plan and then a secondary backup plan.

Which would be fine, because that’s his job, except, Eames stopped for a smoothie on the way home from tailing his mark and had to hear Arthur’s voice, rough with exhaustion, chewing him out for half an hour.

Cobb has literally become the most  pigheaded arsehole since he killed (or didn’t kill) his wife, and Eames would refuse to work for him if it wasn’t for the fact that having Arthur feel like he owes him is one of the most valuable things in dreamshare. It doesn’t even matter, because Cobb could fuck them six ways to sunday and Arthur might not notice, but heaven forbid Eames order a PPV movie after a fifteen hour day.

And then, as if the whim arrived by post, fully formed, Eames thinks: _I am going to extract from him_.

*

Eames is not a man of inaction.

He gets the jump on Arthur the next night when they’re both working late in the warehouse. He’s asleep in the couch, lines of his body controlled and neat even in sleep. Eames puts him under, pushes down his guilt because he just wants Arthur to see it, dreams Arthur into a hidey hole of a hotel in shambles, comes barreling through the door before giving him a chance to get his bearings. “Arthur,” he gasps, holding up a hand to stop Arthur from putting a bullet through him. Even shoved in media res, Arthur’s never wrong footed.

“You need to get out of here,” he tells him, voice hitting just the right pitch of urgency.

"The thirty second rundown?" Arthur demands, jerking a zipped suitcase from under the bed and shoving his laptop bag into it. He doesn’t hesitate, which is strangely gratifying.  

"You’ve been made," he says, " _You_ , Arthur,” and convinces him, of the absolute depth of devastation to be wrought on his head. “The Stein job, six months ago with Dom, could he have sold you out?”

And Arthur snarls _of course not_ , but he doesn’t call him either, and Eames would be a tiny bit elated, but Arthur looks like a vault lock when he puts a little more pressure on him: _go to wherever it is you and Dom have, whatever drop point,_ Eames says, like it’s a given. He just wants Arthur to make the call, because he has to know. Would Arthur’s projection of Cobb come running?

Arthur doesn’t answer for a long minute, wrenching out of his clothes right in front of Eames and into an incongruous outfit, slim fit khaki’s and a maroon hooded sweatshirt, pushing one hand through his hair and he’s done a two minute transformation into someone ten years younger, bag over his shoulder on his way out the door.

“If it’s me they’re looking for —” Arthur says in a flat voice, “— if Dom knows that, he’s already gone.”

Eames, for what its worth is completely floored. “What?”

Arthur shoulders past him, “You’re the one who — why are you wasting so much time,” he demands, before his eyes flash something like suspicion and equal parts fury and hurt as he reaches into his bag. “Eames, what the fuck,” he says. His hand his on his gun, and Eames steels himself to die.

Instead, Arthur swallows a bullet, sparrow fast, and Eames has seen him crumple before, but that split second of panic at dead teammate never quite goes away. It takes Eames a moment to get his bearings and get himself out of the dream as well, by which point Arthur is already at the door.

"Arthur," Eames calls, but Arthur stays his course, long legs making short work of the building, the parking lot. Eames breaks into a run to catch him, blood from the prick at his elbow flowing neglected.

"What do you want," Arthur snarls, his face contorted, when Eames catches up to him, gripping his shoulder.

"I just wanted to know," Eames says, angry, words spilling out recklessly because he knows Arthur is going to break his arm, and he’s already fucked up whatever there is between them by extracting from him. "And I’m glad I do, now. You act like the sun shines out of his arse but now I know, you don’t really think you have his loyalty," he pointed sharply back to the building, "You didn’t think for one second he would come if you called."

"Fuck you," Arthur snarls, "you don’t know anything about loyalty."

He hasn’t broken Eames’ arm yet, but he registers a sharp pain anyway. Precognition, perhaps, and he shoves Arthur back from their point of contact. “Like hell I don’t,” Eames says, “like I’m showing up for these shitty backwoods jobs because of Cobb, the most useless man on the planet, too deluded to see what was going on before he let his wife kill herself, too stupid to stop experimenting before he got stuck in fucking limbo.”

Arthur kicks his legs out from under him, and Eames expects him to run, but he doesn’t. Just stares down at him, panting, in the grimiest alleyway Eames has been in in a while. His elbow takes the brunt of the impact and Eames’ vision whites out for a long instant. “At least,” Arthur says, bright eyed, rasping, “he’s never tried to steal my thoughts. He would never.”

It’s hard to not have the moral high ground against fucking Dominic Cobb, who is basically a trashbag who inexplicably managed to acquire first the love, and then the devotion, of two of the most dynamic minds in dreamshare.

“And yet,” Eames says, feeling sick with the fact that he’s definitely smashing any working respect he once had to pieces in favor of his personal wounds, “you didn’t even consider for a second that he would follow you like you followed him. That wasn’t a subconscious revelation to you when you woke up — you already knew. And you don’t even argue with that arsehole, when you don’t agree with him. You just let him use you, like some sort of groomed schoolboy.”

"Of course I don’t argue with him. Have you ever seen him change his mind?" Arthur’s face is practically luminous with fury. "I’m leaving," he says, and like origami before Eames’ eyes, Arthur tucks away the edges of his anger, straightens his tie, and lets the color drain from his face. Eames thinks, for a blank moment, watching it unfold, that perhaps he’s a better actor than Eames has ever given him credit for. "Don’t ever contact me again."

Which Eames knew was coming, maybe had known since the instant he’d seen Arthur catching a kip on the couch in the warehouse and slid a needle into his vein, in his left arm because he always alternated. Eames climbed off the ground, eyes narrowed. “You do that,” he snarled, “You go on, keep on this miserable charade. But when you do get made and Cobb sells you out like a clearance bin, I want you to know that I’d have showed up at our drop.”

"Of course you would have, you stupid fuck," Arthur says, and it comes out so calmly, Arthur with curves shoulders like a puppet with his strings too-slack. "At least, I used to know that. Now, we’ll never find out."

Ten minutes ago, in a hijacked dream, Arthur hadn’t even checked his totem, hadn’t suspected for a second that Eames could have been pulling the rug from beneath him. Eames thinks of the other thing he’d said, have you ever seen him change his mind? Because Arthur fights constantly with Eames: poking at holes in his theories and fighting like a blacksmith until they’ve dealt with all the details of Eames’ research.

For Cobb, Arthur just makes hundreds of contingency plans to cover each potential snafu, fleshed out on a hierarchical order of likeliness to happen. It isn’t a position of unwavering respect Cobb holds, but the hopeless loyalty to a prodigal son. Eames has got it backwards.

The novelty leaves him speechless as Arthur turns on his heel, heartbeat thudding in his dry mouth.

Eames lets him go. He hardly has any right to do anything else.

*

Arthur and Cobb drop off of Eames’ radar for three months. Eames feels like this is the appropriate amount of time to let him marinate in his own righteous anger. Then, because he’s Arthur, and is good at not being found when that’s not what he wants, Eames makes a few phone calls he knows won’t lead to him.

No one can tell him where Arthur and Cobb are, of course, but word will get back to him that he’s looking.

He expects his newest burner to buzz, or to come into the office where he’s working as a secretary for a mark and be welcomed by a bouquet of flowers with a fuck off note, or simply to be shot at after slipping out of a cab.

Instead, there is radio silence. He works a job with Miriam out of Caracas, a real world con which involves getting very little sleep as he spends two weeks making passports, and another week ready to pull out the fingernails of a vaguely-competent team who nonetheless need more vocal coaching than Eames’ nine year old niece. It’s nice to be working with his hands again: Eames misses getting his hands dirty when he spends too much time in dreamshare, misses the way he finds ink in ridiculous places, like the crook of his elbow.

He heads back to Kenya, because as much as he likes to pretend the son of man has no place to rest his head, he loves the city. He intends to spend a solid week fucking off, doing honest gambling because of the rules about not shitting and eating in the same place, drinking solidly enough to wake up sunburned and shoeless, pissing at ungodly hours against the tusk portal.

He gets to do a few of those, certainly. When Eames gets word of them, the state of them and the price on their heads from his man at Cobol, and Cobb shows up in Mombasa looking for him, it is all very sudden. News tumbling into bigger news, and then a dead Architect and Eames’ blood runs itchy with annoyance at seeing Dom sit across from him like that's something they do.

That’s the absolute worst insult he can think of, he realizes with a dull thread. He’s been scanning the faces of strangers every time he makes his way through town, half-prepared for Arthur to get the jump on him. He’s been waiting for Arthur to scold him for pinging more than two of Arthur’s aliases at once, because if Arthur is wounded enough that he doesn’t want to talk to Eames, giving him an incompetency to rage against would be the least he could do. Instead, sitting in front of him is the man that Eames wanted so badly to prove a weak link that he’d thrown away his entire rapport with Arthur for the chance.

Now, he’s the intermediary between them. Eames’ almost admires his cruelty, even as he is resigning himself to doing whatever it is Arthur wants.

“Arthur,” Eames drawls lazily, as if he doesn't know, or doesn't care, “He’s still working with you?”

He thinks about sending Cobb away. Arthur has made his bed, thrown in his lot, and both Cobol and Proculus have the sort of pockets and reach that no sane man wants to get caught in the crossfires of. Eames takes a look at his phone under the table, where he has a message from an unlisted number.  _Work this job and we're squared away._ _  
_

Eames swallows against the lump in his throat. He has to swallow a lot more to give Dom Cobb an affirmative answer. 

 _Darling,_ he texts back, which is longhand for  _yes._

He wants to do a little better than being even. 

 


End file.
